In an interview, the comic poet Aaron Belz describes how his work as a critic and teacher have improved his poetry:
Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they’ve forced me to focus on the structure of ideas. I tend to think of my poems now as being thesis-driven. My poems are also very sentence-oriented, rarely employing fragments or other grammatical curiosities.
That’s not to say the sentences are always logical. In fact, they are often illogical, but illogic is the Mr. Hyde to logic’s Dr. Jekyll. They’re really the same person, just like saying something and not saying something both imply speech in some sense. Negative space is important. When I teach students to read critically I advise them to look for what the author isn’t saying just as carefully as for what he or she is. I’m sure most teachers do this.
For me, it plays out in my writing, because I’m thinking of all the possibilities of what a sentence or stanza or poem might say, within the context it has established, and then saying only a few of them. Really we’ve only written about .00000000001% of great poems possible to be written.
The Dish 